The winter garden diary

I have been keeping a garden journal: notes and thoughts and ideas jotted down throughout the days as I try to bring my tired and beleaguered courtyard garden back to life after months of neglect and the hottest, driest summer on record.

Would you like to come outside with me? Step into my tiny courtyard and and let’s roll through the seasons from winter to spring…

25 May: Today’s garden tasks feel like a home demolition:

• Pull out the valerian plants that have spread and smothered their neighbours. Do the same with the fishbone ferns and chickweed.

• Pull down the potato vine that covered and shaded the pergola, a casualty of the hot summer

• Pull out the two old lavender bushes that had become bushy and dry (my hands smell like dusty potpourri)

• Also to go: one dead blueberry tree; one dead camellia; one dead rosemary bush; two dead clematis vines

• Heavily prune one of the fuchsias: all the leaves have burned off but there is still green in the wood, so there’s hope

• Cut back the passionfruit vine that tumbles over the fence from the neighbours on one side and is now strangling the Japanese maple, one of the standard roses, and the pomegranate tree. At the same time, cut back the hardenbergia vine on the same side that has joined forces with the passionfruit to choke as much of the garden as it can

• On the other fence, cut back the jasmine that has similarly swamped the Japanese maple, standard rose, climbing rose and crepe myrtle

• Go through the whole garden, aerating it with a fork

• Feed the soil with some compost and turn it all over

• Give it a really good soak with the hose. Still waiting for rain

26 May: It’s late in the season - weeks after Mother’s Day - but I decide to put some of the bulbs my children gave me into the ground, just in case. When I dig into the soil there are slaters, and no worms. 

28 May: Garlic! I’m chatting with my friend Lee, a garlic farmer who wants to teach women in at-risk communities how to grow and harvest garlic to feed their families and earn some extra income. She tells me now is the time to plant them, and advises me to ask for “seed garlic” rather than culinary garlic at the farmers’ markets. Nobody has any (or none they’re willing to sell), but I find a big basket of garden garlic at CERES and buy several bulbs. I plant the cloves in circles around the roses at the front and back of our house, because I read that garlic growing near roses deters aphids. 

8 June: I don’t understand why the two fuchsias, positioned only two metres from one another and receiving equal food, water, shade and sun, grow so differently. One is verdant and glorious, dark green leaves framing stunning coral flowers with such enthusiasm it is positively tropical. On the other, the leaves have wilted and burned. When I cup the leaves in my hands they fall from the plant and crumble to the ground. There is no sign of disease on the plant or in the soil around it… I don’t understand.

9 June: The garlic bulbs I planted last month are shooting skyward, already 10 centimetres above the ground in little circles around all my roses. 

15 June: Pruning fruit trees means seeing several moves ahead, and I have never been good at chess. I need to find someone in-the-know, and actually watch them as they decide what to cut and what to keep. Also, when will my pomegranate fruit? It’s been five years. 

16 June: One of the hardenbergia vines has died. In fact looking around the garden, none of them are looking good. A lot of the leaves have dropped and those that are left look sick. Should I try to revive them? The hated bamboo fence is also looking a lot worse for wear. Hardenbergia has wound around it, thickened, and pulled the fence from its framework. It is buckled in several places. I’m tossing up between rehabilitation and removal. 

22 June: I cut down the hardenbergia that died. I have to extract the broken pieces from the fence piece by piece, since it is too tightly and thickly wound to unravel. I manage to cut it back to a stump but can’t for the life of me get the roots up or the stump out. It doesn’t even budge.

6 July: The garden is properly asleep. I’ve pruned and prodded, aerated and hosed, fed (gently, because it’s winter) and fussed. And now there are bare walls, stumps and brown earth where once was green joy. I put some rows of flower seedlings into the sun-drenched beds at the bottom of the garden, to get a head start for spring, but almost everywhere else the focus is rest. I’ve always heard that sleep, fresh air and good nutrition are the best ingredients for recovering from illnesses, and I hope the same will be true for my little garden. 

7 July: I make a call and pull out all the other hardenbergia vines - sick-looking and neighbour-strangling every one of them. Actually I don’t pull them out because I can’t. I cut them down to the stumps. Without the hardenbergia I can see just how damaged the bamboo fence really is. It buckles in some places and swings freely in others, falling over my fragile flower seedlings, breaking them off at the top. I pull on gloves and heavy boots and just tear the entire fence down.

13 July. Still no worms. I feed the soil, mulch it, and bid it goodnight. The pile of dead vines and tree-branches takes up the entire grassed area of the garden. It’s about the size of a small SUV, or a Solstice bonfire. I call the Council and book eight separate “green waste” pick-ups, since they’ll only take what I can fit in our one green wheelie bin. 

4 August: I think I have solved the mystery of the fuchsia. It was the hardenbergia! I was separating out some of the stock and sea holly seedlings that were growing too close to one another after I planted them last month, when I came across a root, running horizontally about 10 centimetres underground, that didn’t belong to anything. it was thick - about as thick as a man’s thumb - and as I started to pull it up it just seemed to never end. I followed it inch by inch, carefully extracting it from under the flower seedlings, to try and find the source. Finally I followed it all the way to the stump of the hardenbergia in the bottom corner of our garden, next to the pomegranate tree and beside the gate. I dug down at the base, deep, deep, and found another root. This one was almost as thick as my wrist! I followed it backwards and it spread in another direction and I pulled it, piece by piece, out of the garden bed. I repeated this again and again until, finally, the whole hardenbergia stump lifted out of the ground. It looked like a squid! A rock-solid stump with powerful roots radiating out of it more than a metre in every direction like giant tentacles. 

As I was pulling out a hardenbergia close to the house, I had to completely uproot two of the winter roses and disturb a flowering daphne, but I still hadn’t reached the end yet. I pulled harder, and that’s when I noticed my fuchsia - the fuchsia that had almost died in autumn - wobbling. The hardenbergia root was directly under the fuchsia, stealing all its food.

3 September: Robert, who painted our whole house for us a few years ago, comes back and paints the brick wall that had been behind the bamboo fence. A soft white. It’s blinding in the sunlight, but hopefully over time vines (not hardenbergia!) will grow up and cover it.  

7 September: The calendar says Spring although the weather begs to differ. Our school hosts a Father’s Day breakfast in the courtyard, and it is only 3 degrees. I start thinking about a future fundraiser to purchase braziers! Still, I’m sure the weather will warm up soon, and it is finally time to start planting. 

• White and pale pink clematis, alternating with white, pink or red roses, all the way along both fences

• Three apple trees (dwarf so they won’t overwhelm the little garden), in pollination-friendly varieties

• Two fruiting grape vines (bare rooted and dormant) to cover the pergola

• A new hydrangea to replace the one that died last season

• Seeds sown into old egg cartons and sat under the sun on the dining-room table: bee-friendly flowers like nigella, sunflowers, dill, lupins and more. I’m still looking for comfrey

• I plant strawberries under the apple trees

22 September: Signs of life! Every morning I saunter into the dew-wet garden with my tea in hand, watching my breath form clouds in the air, looking for signs of life. Today I found some! Green buds on one of the apple trees, and red buds on the Japanese maple. The very first bluebell is a shocking blue, and there are buds on the sweet pea. The flowers I planted are doing so well now that I have to separate them again, although there are no blooms yet. I put my mother’s elderberry plant into the ground and promise myself I’ll keep it trimmed to a shrub. Nothing on the grapevines yet, but there’s some kind of swelling. Something is happening. 

9 October: Here is a list of blooms that are making my little garden a fragrant rainbow of joy:

• Foxgloves

• Delphiniums

• Sweetpeas

• Poppies

• Fuchsia (both of them!)

• Wild strawberries

• Lillies of the valley

• Clematis

• Valerian

• Hellebores

• Columbines

• Alyssum

• Apple blossoms

• And one red rose

And last weekend when I was digging, I found something even better. Worms!

Lessons from the summer garden

I have been waiting for the weather to cool.

The summer’s evening we returned home from France, I stood in my little garden in the shocking humidity, and took these pictures. It was a jungle. Abundant and overgrown, some plants thriving and other plants choking, and I made plans to gently nurture it back to life. My very own Secret Garden.

I made a start, cutting back the valerian and unwinding the clematis so the other plants could breathe. There was no saving the blueberry bush, one of the hydrangeas or two of the camellias. Two out of three of the Japanese maples were looking decidedly sad.

But I still held out hope for the roses, the pomegranate, and my favourite oak-leaf hydrangea, and the honeysuckle was so healthy it had all-but swallowed the children’s cubby house whole.

But instead of making it better, I only made things worse. Clearing away the overgrown vines left my space-starved plants vulnerable when the heat came - and come it did, less than a week later, in waves of day after day with temperatures in the late 30s and early 40s, Celsius.

No amount of water can keep alive a plant that is being literally burned from the sky. One of my happily-blooming fuchsias was the first to go. At the end of one particularly long, hot day (long after dark it was still 36 degrees), every leaf had turned brown. When I cupped the leaves in my hand, they fell from the stems and crumbled to dust.

The little Jack Frost plants soon followed suit, and most of the Japanese windflowers. Soon my gardenias were looking sad, the oak-leaf hydrangea crisped at all the edges, and the leaves began dropping off the Japanese maple.

None of the border plants survived, and brown began to swallow green.

The poets of ancient Jerusalem wrote, “To everything there is a season.” (Or were they quoting Pete Seeger?) And nowhere is that more evident than in an actual garden, where the seasons govern, and human intervention can only go so far in changing or mitigating what nature intends.

One of the things I noticed about the public flower gardens in France was that in spring and summer, they were more beautiful than anything you could imagine: full of shocking, extravagant colour like a fragrant, bee-filled rainbow explosion. But when autumn came and the seed-heads drooped, gardeners cut everything back, aerated the ground, and let it rest for the cooler months. It wasn’t pretty: brown patches of earth with the odd leftover strand of sad annual eking out the last of its days.

We don’t tend to do that in Australia. We plant and tend for year-round cover, and seek colour in every season. I know I’ve tried this in my own little garden, filling those brown patches as best I can in winter so we only look out on green.

But respecting the season means working with nature, rather than fighting it.

Those plants in my garden shouldn’t have been left to smother one another but, once it was done, I should have known better than to strip things bare right when the worst of the heat was about to begin. And I had known it would begin: January and February where I live are the hottest months of the year.

But I was impatient, eager to reconnect with my home by putting my hands in the earth, and I wouldn’t wait. In many parts of Europe, brown and grey are the colours of winter. I made them the colour of Melbourne in summer, too.

Gardens teach us patience, if we will let them. To everything there is a season. There is a season for brown, and a season for colour. A season for hot, and a season for cold.

A season for abundance, and a season for rest.

My friend Brenner and I send one another voice-messages most days, little audio missives that carry with them the ambience of our respective worlds. In mine, while soaring temperatures burn everything around me and sting my eyelashes, there is a heartbreaking crunch of dry things underfoot as I walk and talk. In Brenner’s messages, sent to me from her home in tropical far-north Queensland, I hear frogs and cicadas, and the soft and ever-present sound of rain. Up there, these seasons aren’t spring-summer-autumn-winter. They are known as the wet season, and the dry.

Nature comes back.

Even my burnt plants will re-shoot leaves. And if they don’t, others will clamber over and take their place.

So I will wait. When the weather cools, I will replant but, when winter comes, I will allow my garden to rest. To lie fallow, the way nature intended. It’s ok, I will remind it, to be brown.

Come spring, I hope I can bring you a rainbow.